Burgess Owens Quotes

What we, as black people, need to do is we need to worry about our education.

Before Booker T. Washington, we have small business owners but we do not have a philosopher of black entrepreneurship, and that's what Washington was.

The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own newspapers, our own restaurants, our own theaters, our own small shops, our own clubs, our own Masonic lodges.

I am true to my own race. I wish to see all done that can be done for their encouragement, to assist them in acquiring property, in becoming intelligent, enlightened, useful, valuable citizens.

If black people use their resources properly, they can become as competitive as any group in society - take control of our neighborhoods, our businesses, our schools, including our teachers. The only thing keeping black people from doing it is this idiotic idea about integration, about being racially balanced.

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

There are too many African-Americans with too much money for us to have to go to anybody else for anything in terms of schools, in terms of scholarships, in terms of entrepreneurship, in terms of moving us along as a group to that place where we should be as a people.

We must recognize that all the civil rights laws in the world are not going to solve the problem of minority underachievement. Ultimately, blacks and Hispanics are going to have to see that their solution is largely in their own hands.

If we cannot provide excellent educational opportunities to all children, safe communities, quality health coverage, or robust and fair avenues towards wealth creation, then our nation will increasingly be in peril.

The black community has been the foundation of the progressive community in this country for a long time.

I would provide more opportunities for the kids of urban communities to go to school and learn trades - to get more jobs to take care of their families.

Governmental intervention and personal responsibility are not mutually exclusive issues, but they do frame a 'do it ourselves' vs. 'what are you doing for us' debate. For the black community, that's a debate that's been raging at least as far back as the W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington philosophical grudge matches.

If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.

Booker T. Washington was a very vindictive man…. Staff would have to get his permission before they married.

I will begin a new program to get private enterprise into the ghetto and the ghetto into private enterprise. I call it “Black Capitalism.” More black ownership of business and land and homes can be the multiplier of pride that will end our racial strife.

The Negro lawyer must be trained as a social engineer and group interpreter. Due to the Negro's social and political condition ... the Negro lawyer must be prepared to anticipate, guide and interpret his group advancement.... Moreover, he must act as business advisor ... for the protection of the scattered resources possessed or controlled by the group.... He must provide more ways and means for holding within the group the income now flowing through it.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes

If not for food stamps, Medicaid, and various job programs, I would never have gone on to be the first in my family to go to college, the first black woman to represent my ward on the Cleveland City Council, and, ultimately, a State Senator.

Black Consciousness seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life.

Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years. Black thinkers as far back as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have done the same.

Lucio Tan Group has had an historic interest in education. From my days as a struggling working student, I knew that education is the key to escape from the clutches of poverty.

I think in order to achieve real change, we as the black community need to come up with real asks and we have to determine, what do we actually want? We obviously want some social reform, on police brutality and things like that. We also need political changes. But it's more than voting. What are we as black people asking of these politicians?

My dad's entire business and enterprises have been about helping the African-American community.

In Congress, I will fight for an education system that bridges the opportunity gap in order to help close the achievement gap, and prioritize models that sustain and enrich whole people and communities.

The 21st century for the black community is about building human capital. That is the undone business. That is the unmet need. That is the completion of the civil rights mission.